Acting for the Job You Want

Develop qualities for a senior position#

When surveyed, developers almost universally identify a few qualities that you should develop as you prepare for the next level:

Regardless of what your engineering ladder says, you will want to practice, practice, practice these skills as much as you can. They are just generally agreed-upon qualities of a senior engineer that will help you and those around you throughout your career.

📝 Note: More on this in the Senior Developer chapter.

Dreyfus model of skill acquisition#

When it comes to your technical skills, consider how you are progressing along with the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition:

In your journey so far, you have likely progressed from novice to competent. As you go towards becoming an expert in your field, you will likely want to pay attention to the meta-learning skills; focus on first principles intuition when it comes to learning your trade.

Tacit knowledge#

Much of your learning from junior to senior involves gaining tacit knowledge. You can read all the programming books in the world, but, by definition, you are still limited to things that people can write down. This is explicit knowledge, and it is usually the tip of the iceberg when it comes to everything you need to know:

Tacit knowledge in engineering is a real thing. Keep a lookout for all the lessons you don’t learn in classes or from books. To really make your career explode, make a habit of writing them down for everyone else.

📝 Note: More on this in the Write, A Lot chapter.

You aren’t alone in this journey; plenty of fellow developers have also written down their learnings. You can only get so far learning from your own experience – why not borrow the experiences of others? It’s not the same as living through it yourself, but reading through publicly published postmortems, for example, can teach you that many outages, even by the most well-regarded companies, come down to error handling, configuration, hardware, lack of monitoring, and processes that allow human error.

See the bigger picture#

Many people define senior developers as “being able to see the bigger picture.” Everyone agrees it’s important, but nobody quite knows how to define it. It has something to do with how your technical work fits in the context of the business/product or fits in the broader architecture of the codebase, balancing both its history and future roadmap. So, try to step back from your day-to-day work every so often and zoom out!

Find out what you like#

Before you make your big move, make sure you know what you want and take the time to position yourself accordingly in the preceding six to twelve months. Want to work on creating GraphQL APIs as a senior? Better to do it as a junior first.

The logic here is: You aren’t expected to make that much impact as a junior, but you certainly will as a senior. So, it can be worth it to jockey around a little bit longer as a junior or intermediate developer to ensure you are in the perfect spot for a career-making senior developer role you can wholeheartedly throw yourself into. Better yet, your company can institute formal support for employees making internal “tours of duty” to grow you while keeping you!

It can help to make a list of what you’ve enjoyed in your current job. Among your peers (you have been building your network, right?), make a note of things that seem particularly exciting to you and try to get exposure within your company or projects. It’s a two-way street— finding out what you like and are good at, and then positioning so that you can do even more of that.

📝 Note: This is the subject of the entire Strategy section of this course!

Find out who you like to work with#

By the way, beyond just what you like to work on, you might also take note of who you like to work with. Here’s an example from Keavy McMinn.